software engineering / tech careers / job search
No Internship Yet?: Build Experience That Counts
Build experience for your first software engineering role through substantial projects, open-source contributions, research work, hackathons and internships. Learn to explain your contribution on your résumé.
Transcript
0:00You're standing in line in the career fair
0:02and you have your resume in hand You
0:05give the resume to the meta engineer He
0:09takes two seconds to look at it and
0:12tells you sorry buddy you're not gonna work
0:15here You're not going to get this job
0:18This is a true story that happened with
0:20my identical twin brother during his career fair
0:24when he was a junior at Cornell University
0:28Less than five years later my twin brother
0:31is now currently a senior level software engineer
0:35at Meta And he followed these guidelines to
0:39get his big tech software engineering job So
0:43you're a junior software engineer and you want
0:45to learn how do you build a proper
0:47resume that makes these senior engineers want to
0:52hire you They want to have you on
0:55their team then stop and save this video
0:58The very first step to building a strong
1:02resume is you need real world work experience
1:06And this can come in a variety of
1:09different ways So number one if you have
1:11absolutely no work experience what you need to
1:14do is build some substantial projects When I
1:18say a substantial project it can mean a
1:21class project if you have literally nothing else
1:25to go on But you should definitely go
1:28a step further Contribute to a popular open
1:31source repo This isn't going to take you
1:34a couple of hours right You actually have
1:36to sit down explore the code base and
1:39think of a real contribution that the contributors
1:43want to add to the repo Go to
1:47your school and try to find research opportunities
1:50You can find research opportunities in computer science
1:52but you can also find research opportunities in
1:54other fields like computational biology computational physics Hell
1:58you can work at a regular psychology lab
2:00and build out the workflows to make it
2:03easier for them to run their experiments You
2:07don't have to work at a computer science
2:09lab to do computer science or software engineering
2:13work Go to hackathons and hell don't just
2:16go to the hackathon win Win a prize
2:20or try your damnedest to win a prize
2:22and build a project you can put on
2:25your Get an unpaid internship if that's what
2:30you have to do My very first job
2:32was an unpaid internship and my first job
2:34after I graduated I made 215 000 per
2:39year You're not above an unpaid internship if
2:42you have no experience Get some experience and
2:47that way you can build out your resume
2:49This video is getting too long so like
2:51and follow for part two
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